Chef Roy Choi Wants to Be Your Best Friend in Las Vegas
"For chef Roy Choi, Los Angeles is more than just home. It’s also where he helped pioneer the gourmet food truck revolution in 2008 with the Kogi BBQ truck, which roamed the streets of L.A. serving Korean barbeque wrapped in tacos and burritos, using the then-new social media platform of Twitter to tweet out its location. Since then, Choi has brought his Korean-style dishes to proper stand-alone restaurants in Los Angeles, like A-Frame(ribs), Chego (rice bowls), and the now-closed Commissary at The LINE L.A. (vegetables), as well as catering Locol (healthyish fast-food). He’s also joined the ranks of chefs who’ve turned into television stars, having appeared on shows such as Top Chef, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, and a smattering of other foodie productions. Soon, he'll be hosting a new public television series called Broken Bread, about conscious cooking and community building. The interior dining room features murals with famous faces, and hanging plants that are a nod to Choi's former L.A. spot, Commissary. But it's his latest restaurant, Best Friend—in Las Vegas, fittingly—that may be his biggest production yet. Take the entrance alone: it resembles a neighborhood liquor store, but is Vegas-ified with neon signs (one says Free Smells) and a dizzying array of colors. You'll first enter a small shop—with ample neon-colored merchandise for sale—before walking through not one, but two, sets of bright vinyl curtains, like the ones typically found in a meat refrigerator, before finding yourself in an expansive restaurant. There are murals featuring celebrities, hanging plants (a nod to the old greenhouse locale of Commissary), black and white photography on the walls, and a DJ booth. The servers walk around in 80s-style bright green tracksuits, and at the back is an open kitchen, where you'll find Choi a few times a week. His greatest hits are on the menu here, along with some that were clearly created for the Vegas experience—like caviar tostadas. There’s also a special refrigerator devoted to storing kimchi. Fully aware that his longtime fans might not go for this splashy outfit—it's inside the new Park MGM Las Vegas, next to Eataly—Choi said he’s found the beauty in having a big budget, comparing the restaurant opening to a Marvel movie. “It allowed me to get out everything that I was seeing creatively in my mind and really bring it to life,” he says. Choi spoke to Traveler about the new restaurant, his love for Las Vegas, and and his tried-and-true hangover cure."
